Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1209 page)

Just where the Battalion lay, our front line was two hundred yards from the enemy — too far for hand-bombing, but deadly for artillery and machine-gun work. Our artillery was declared to be more numerous and powerful than the German, which generally showered our supports and reserves with shrapnel, while machine-guns kept down the heads of the front line with small-arm fire. Orders had been issued at that moment that recesses should be built, at twenty-five yard intervals in our fire-trench parapets, for mounting gas cylinders, and the Battalion worked at this new fatigue under the direction of an Engineer Officer, Lieutenant Ritchie. The recesses meant nothing in particular, but gave people a pleasant feeling that there was abundance of gas somewhere in the background. They were regularly shelled, but, mankind being infinitely adaptable, had come in the few days of this new life to look on it as almost normal, and to alleviate it with small shifts and contrivances. “I think,” says one of the beginners, “that in those days we were as selfcentred as a suburban villa-residence. The fact of not being able to put your head up without having a shot through it kept us from worrying about our neighbours.” Their first experience of external trouble in their underground world began on the afternoon of the 8th October, when loud bombing and shelling broke out two battalions down the line to the right, and some one from the 3rd Grenadiers came charging round the traverses asking for all available bombers, because the Germans had got into their line and were making rather a hash of things. Bombers were accordingly sent, though their experience with the live bomb was limited, and the two companies on the right got to work on sandbags to bulkhead their right flank in case of a break through. No one really thought that they would be attacked, possibly for the reason that such a thing had not happened to them personally before. “You see, we had lost count of time — even of the days of the week. Every day seemed as long as a year, and I suppose we considered ourselves like aged men — prisoners of Chillon, you know. We didn’t think anything could happen.” On that occasion they were correct. The riot died down and they fell back into normal night routine, every second man in the fire-trench on sentry, every fifth man in support seventy or eighty yards behind, and relief every hour; one officer sitting, between rounds, on one particular spot of the fire-step (so that every one knew where to find him), discussing life, death, Very lights, and politics with his C.S.M. and at intervals peering over the parapet; another officer pervading the support-trench where bayonet charges are supposed to be supplied from, and where the men grumble that they are always set to make fancy improvements. Meantime, the dim dark on every hand is marked with distant pin-pricks and dots, or nearer blurs or blasts of fire, that reveal the torn edges of the shell-holes like wave-crests of a petrified ocean. Yet, after a few nights, the men in the front line said their chief difficulty was to avoid dozing off “because there was nothing to do.”

They lost three killed and nineteen wounded from all causes between the 7th and 8th October, but completed the recesses for the gas-cylinders, and cleaned out an indescribably old trench, needed for future operations, of its stale corpses mixed with bomb-boxes. While this delicate job was in progress, the enemy started shelling that section with high explosives and shrapnel. They had to shift twenty boxes of bombs under, first, a particular and next a general bombardment, which was connected with a German attack a little farther down the line. Their relief came that same day, on the 12th October, after their first full week in the trenches. It was not a cheerful affair. Three battalions were involved in the chaos, as far as the 2nd Irish Guards was concerned. What befell the rest of their Brigade may be left to the imagination. A reconnoitring party of the 1st Monmouths — four officers and eight other ranks — turned up at a quarter past five to look over the Irish Guards’ trenches before their own men came. They were sitting just outside Battalion Headquarters when a 5.9 killed one of the officers and three of the other ranks, wounded the three other officers, and buried the whole party. The Diary, rightly regardful of the interests of the Battalion, observes: “Another lucky escape for our Battalion H.Q. Staff. For this was the spot in the trench normally occupied by the senior drill-sergeant and all the orderlies.” Even so, the Monmouths were the only relieving unit that had any idea where they were or what they were to take over. The others, the 4th and 5th Leicesters, lost themselves on the way and wandered blasphemous among trenches. “The consequent confusion was deplorable.” The Battalion were chaperoning themselves and others from half-past ten to a quarter past four in the morning. Then began the mile and a half of nightmare-like crawl up the seven-foot-deep communication-trench, whose sides took strange Egyptian-desert-like colours in the dawn-light, and whose bends and windings bewildered all sense of direction. They shuffled in file behind each other like migrating caterpillars, silently except for the grunt and jerk of a tired man slipping in mud, and whispers along the echoing cut bidding them always “close up.” They were all out, in every way, at five o’clock. The relief had begun at eight. After this, they marched three or four hours to billets at Vaudricourt and Drouvin, within sound but out of reach of the guns, where they dropped and slept and shaved and washed, and their officers were grateful to pig down, six together, on the floor of a loft, and none troubled them till four in the afternoon when they were ordered to parade “clean.”

Only two nights were allowed for rest and refit, during which time a draft of fifty men under Lieutenant Kinahan joined, and the Battalion bombers were “organised” (they had not thrown very well lately) and made up to eight per platoon. That was on the 14th October. Next morning the Brigadier called up the C.O.’s of all four battalions and instructed them that every bomber was, as far as possible, to be given the chance of throwing a live bomb before going into the trenches again. He added that “again” meant next morning. On the morning of the 15th October, then, each one of those one hundred and twenty-eight organised bombers did, at practice, throw one live bomb. Says the Diary, without even a note of exclamation “With the knowledge, experience, and confidence thus gained, they had to face trained German bombers a few days later.” They might have had to face them that same evening when they took over some Brigade Reserve trenches, directly behind those of their first tour, from the 7th and 8th Sherwood Foresters; but they were merely shelled as they settled in, and the bombing fell farther down the line. Their new trenches were dirty and badly knocked about, but, by some obscure forethought or other, well provided with small and fairly safe dug-outs which gave cover to almost all. Though they were heavily shelled their first two days, and many direct hits fell on the parapet itself, and many men were buried, only two were killed outright and thirty-two wounded. The sensation of being pinned, even when one has one’s head above ground, by a weight of pressing earth, added to natural speculation as to whether the next shell may complete the burial, is a horror that returns to a man in his dreams, and takes the heart out of some even more than dysentery. (“There’s something in being held tight that makes you lose hold of yourself. I’ve seen men screamin’ and kickin’ like wired hares, and them no more than caught by one leg or two. ‘Tis against Nature for a man to be buried with his breath in him.”)

A RAID

On the 18th October they relieved the 1st Coldstream in the front line on the west face of Hohenzollern redoubt, which, were there choice, might be reckoned the very warmest sector of all the neighbourhood. Both battalions knowing their business, the relief was effected in two and a half hours under heavy shelling without casualty, though the Irish lost two killed and three wounded in the earlier part of the day. Their new position ran without definite distinction, except sandbagged barricades, into the German system, and one might at any time crawl into nests of enemy sentries and bombers. This, again, was a fresh experience to them. Loos had been clean cut in its boundaries. Their week in Left and Right Boyau from the 8th to the 15th October had not led to undue intimacies with anything worse than Jack Johnsons, but now they were promised a change of methods. Since the great breakthrough had failed that was to carry our triumphant arms to Lille, the authorities seemed to attach immense importance to the possession of a few score yards of enemy trench, commanded, when won, by a few thousand yards of other trenches, and were willing to expend much blood upon the captures. Doubtless there was deep design at the back of the detailed work, but, from the point of view of those who had to carry it through, it was a little wearisome. They were warned that bombing attacks would be the order of the day, and on the 10th October their Brigadier visited them and, as a preliminary, ordered that a trench should be run to connect Guildford Street, on the left of the redoubt as they faced it, with West Face Trench, a matter of some “sixty yards over ground fully exposed to hostile fire at a range of sixty yards.” In this manner, then, was the trench dug. Beginning in the dark at eight o’clock 2nd Lieutenant A. Pym, with a party of No. 1 Company, crept out of West Face, Lance-Sergeant Comesky leading, and the whole chain crawling behind him “extended” (on their stomachs) along the line to be dug. They had noted the bearing very carefully in the daytime, and a party in Guildford Street under 2nd Lieutenant T. Nugent were trying to help them to keep it, in a subdued tone. One must not shout when there are rifles and machine-guns, hands on triggers, fifty yards away. As the party lay they dug and scratched, first with their entrenching implements, and then with picks and shovels passed along the line; and Lance-Sergeant Comesky, the curve of whose labouring back in the darkness was their guide, had to keep his direction through broken wire, what had been broken men, shellholes, and the infinite tangle and waste of war. The Irish have some small reputation for digging when there is need. They dug that night as not even the 1st Battalion had dug, and when light came the new trench was four and a half feet deep, and the sole casualty was Lance-Sergeant Comesky, slightly wounded. They had been suspected and “slated” by machine-gun fire in their direction from time to time, but were not actually located till they were well down. As a point of vantage the new line had its defects. By daylight no periscope could live there half a minute ere it was knocked to shivers by rifle-fire.

Meantime a couple of little reconnaissances had been sent out. Private Horton (he had already shown his gifts in this direction), “supported by a corporal and another man,” made his way along an old blown-in trench that ran up the centre of the mass of the Hohenzollern works, till he heard Germans talking at the far end of it, and so reported. The second reconnaissance by Lance-Sergeant G. McCarthy and Private Kingston of No. 2 Company explored along another blown-in trench to the left of Private Horton’s line, which, before our guns had wrecked it, had been a continuation of West Face Trench and had run into Little Willie of unsavoury reputation, which latter in its turn trended almost due north into the German works. They found this trench barricaded just at its junction with Little Willie, were fired on by a German sentry, and came away. So far good. The Brigadier’s instructions next morning were for a night-attack to be made along both these trenches which lay parallel to each other; for barricades to be run up at the far end of the lengths gained; and, later, the two points to be joined up by a fresh cut. This, it was hoped, would pinch out about fifty yards of occupied German trench opposite the one which had been dug that night by 2nd Lieutenants A. Pym’s and Nugent’s party from Guildford Street to West Face. What might arrive after that was a question of luck, comparable to ferreting in a populous warren. The Battalion spent the day under shell-fire that killed one man and wounded nine, in making arrangements for bombs and sand-bags for the barricades, and decided that the chain of men working up the trenches, which barely allowed one and a half men abreast, should consist of two bombers, two riflemen; two bombers and two riflemen again; and four men to carry spare bombs. These were to drive the enemy back and hold them while new barricades were being built in the annexed territory. Then would come an officer and four more bombers to “hold the new barricade in event of the leading bombers being rushed while it was being built, then two men to build the barricade; then a chain of riflemen at two-yard intervals reaching back to the point of departure who would pass up more bombs or sand-bags as need arose,” and would clean up the old trench along which our advance was made, “so as to give us free access to our new barricade in daylight.” It is to be borne in mind that, at that time, the bombers of the 2nd Irish Guards had thrown just one live bomb apiece at training. (“We went in great dread of our rear-ranks that night. A bomb’s no thing — more than fixed bayonets — to go capering up trenches with at
anny
time. And the first time least of all.”)

The attack was confided to No. 4 Company (Captain Hubbard), who chose 2nd Lieutenants T. F. Tallents and Hamilton for the left and right attacks respectively. They led out at one in the morning, very carefully, for the men were cautioned to stalk the enemy as much as possible, but the moment they were discovered, to rush him back up the trench. So he had to be listened for in the dark, with a sky full of noises overhead. As soon as “contact had been obtained” — that is to say, as soon as the first crack of a bomb and the yell that accompanies it were heard down the cutting — the Very lights were sent up for a signal for our guns and the troops on either side to annoy and divert. Bombing affairs of the year ‘15 were on the most simple lines and unaccompanied by barrage. The left attack, when it had toiled some sixty yards from its starting-point, met a party of German bombers. What followed was inevitable. “Our bombers, who had never had an opportunity of throwing more than one live bomb each at training, were easily out-classed by the German bombers, and they were all either killed, wounded, or driven back immediately on to 2nd Lieutenant Tallents.” He was coming up twenty or thirty yards behind them, and had just reached some old smashed girders that had been part of a bridge or a dug-out, and back to this tangle the attack was driven. There a stand was made for a while by Tallents and two privates, Higgins and Brophy, till Brophy was killed and the officer and other private wounded. The Germans bombed their way on down to the barricades whence the attack had been launched, and for twenty minutes it was touch and go whether the Irish could hold it even there. All this while Tallents, though wounded, headed the resistance, urged the men to strengthen the barrier, and then got atop of it, “so as to make a longer or more accurate shot with a bomb.” Bombs ran short, as they usually do on such occasions; the bombers were down and between men’s feet among the wreckage. 2nd Lieutenant Coxon, who was sending up fresh men and bombs as best he might over broken ground in darkness down blind trappy trenches, indented on Battalion Headquarters for more, and the 1st Coldstream whirled their bombers in till, by means that no one can quite recall, the German rush was stayed long enough for a steady supply of munitions to arrive. This was about four in the morning, after a couple of hours of mixed rough-and-tumble that had died out for the moment to snaps of rifle-fire round corners, and the occasional glare of a bomb lobbed over some cover in the obstructed trench. Tallents had kept his place at the barrier all the time, and, at what turned out to be the psychological moment, launched a fresh attack down the trench, headed by Lance-Corporals J. Brennan and C. Anstey and backed by Lance-Corporal Cahill. It gave time for the men behind to further strengthen the defence, while more bombs were coming up. Then Tallents collapsed and “was removed to the dressing station,” and 2nd Lieutenant F. Synge was sent up to relieve him. He was hit in the head almost at once, but remained at his post, and “never relaxed his efforts to get the position consolidated and tenable,” until he too was withdrawn to the dressing-station after dawn. By this time the barricade was completed, and the communication-trench back to the main body was sufficiently cleared to enable work to be continued in daylight.